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Yale law professor and best-selling novelist, Stephen Carter, explores the impossibility and undesirability of limiting dialogue in the university, at The Veritas Forum at Columbia:

“What frightens me sometimes and worries me a lot about the academy is a sense that there ought to be a kind of leveling of conversation – a very narrow set of points from which we begin – and that narrowing doesn’t really create a common dialogue: it creates a dialogue from which a lot of people are excluded. It may be that there are people in some institutions – secular as well as religious – who would prefer a dialogue from which certain voices were excluded. But it’s not my vision of democracy, or of deep and genuine conversation.”